What are the advantages of vacuum heat treatment?

vacuum furnace in testing

Vacuum heat treatment can achieve almost all heat treatment processes such as quenching, annealing, tempering, carburizing, chromium and nitriding. Compared with ordinary heat treatment, it has the following advantages:

Advantages of vacuum heat treatment

1. No oxidation, no decarburization, and no carbon increase on the inner surface of the workpiece have a very good protection effect.

Oxidation makes the metal surface lose its metallic luster, increases surface roughness, and reduces precision, steel surface oxide is often the source of quenching soft spots and quenching cracking, reducing the strength of steel and other mechanical properties.

Vacuum heat treatment because the metal is heated under a certain vacuum, the workpiece avoids contact with oxygen, the workpiece has no oxidation, no decarburization, bright surface, good quality heat treatment, in the vacuum state, no recovery reaction, no carbon increase phenomenon. After adding a protective agent on the surface of the workpiece, the advantages of vacuum heat treatment are more obvious compared with vacuum quenching.

2. Improve overall mechanical properties, degassing, and promote metal surface purification

The vacuum has an obvious degassing effect on liquid metal and also has a good degassing effect on dissolved gas in solid metal. Hydrogen is the most harmful gas in metals. When heated in a vacuum, the hydrogen in metals and alloys can be quickly minimized to eliminate hydrogen embrittlement, thus improving the plasticity, toughness, and fatigue strength of the material and the overall mechanical properties of the workpiece. When metals and alloys are heated in a vacuum, if the vacuum level is lower than the decomposition pressure of the corresponding oxide, the oxide will decompose and free oxygen is immediately discharged from the vacuum chamber, further improving the surface quality of the metal.

3. Workpiece deformation

Generally speaking, the treated workpiece is heated in the furnace by thermal radiation, the temperature difference between inside and outside is small, and the thermal stress is small, which determines the small deformation of the parts during vacuum heat treatment. At the same time, heating and quenching under a vacuum are automatically completed, avoiding the handling of hot workpieces in the air (salt bath treatment and atmospheric protection treatment, although heated in an adiabatic environment, but still quenched in the air or quenching medium containing oxygen molecules), reducing the artificial processing deformation.

4. can reduce the volatility of the workpiece containing gold elements

Vacuum heat treatment can be heated and quenched in a controlled atmosphere, thereby reducing the volatility of gold elements in the workpiece to ensure the quality of heat treatment of the workpiece.

5. The vacuum heat treatment furnace has high thermal efficiency, can quickly heat up and cool down; has good stability and repeatability, a good working environment, safe operation, no pollution, and public hazards.

Vacuum furnaces recommend :

 

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